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When a hotel gives a description of the rooms in the facility, which sentence is correct and why?

All the rooms are equipped with a free internet connection.

All rooms are equipped with a free internet connection.

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2  
Related: difference between 'all' and 'all the'. – RegDwighт♦ Aug 1 '11 at 15:21
@RegDwight: I read the related post before I asked this and it doesn't help resolve anything. – Richard Rodriguez Aug 1 '11 at 15:23
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In that case, it would have been beneficial to include that information in the body of your question right away. Explaining why it doesn't help you would be appreciated, too. Lastly, you always have the option of putting a bounty on a question you deem unanswered or answered poorly. – RegDwighт♦ Aug 1 '11 at 16:35

2 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

In ordinary speech and writing, I would say "all the rooms".

In a promotional context "all rooms" is common.

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+1 for what intuitively sounds right to me. Dropping the word "the" does indeed have overtones of "ad-speak". – FumbleFingers Aug 1 '11 at 16:52
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Both are correct, because both are idiomatic shortenings of grammatically correct sentences. The elided words are clear from the context. The sentence

All the rooms are equipped with a free internet connection.

is a concise expression of the more verbose sentence

All [of] the rooms [in this hotel] are equipped with a free internet connection.

Likewise, the sentence

All rooms are equipped with a free internet connection.

is a shortened version of the sentence

[In this hotel,] all rooms are equipped with a free internet connection.

There are other possible "source" sentences, but to me, these seem to be the most likely candidates.

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You seem to imply that OP's contructions are somehow "less grammatical" because they don't include "of" and/or "in this hotel", but I don't think this has any relevance to grammatical correctness. – FumbleFingers Aug 1 '11 at 16:54
@FumbleFingers, I'm not sure what I said that would imply that. I explicitly said that both are correct! – senderle Aug 1 '11 at 17:33
Well, you also say they're both "idiomatic shortenings", which seems at best "questionable" to me. You might as well say "rooms" is an idiomatic shortening of "rooms available for hire", since there will be other rooms in the building that don't have an internet connection, such as the staff toilets. – FumbleFingers Aug 1 '11 at 17:35
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@FumbleFingers, that must be the source of our disagreement. I'm thinking of "idiomatic" as meaning "linguistic usage that is grammatical and natural to native speakers of a language." You'll have to scroll down a bit to find that one; so perhaps I am using "idiomatic" somewhat idiomatically (in your sense) :). – senderle Aug 1 '11 at 21:54
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senderle, I think that what @FumbleFingers is unhappy with is your use of "shortening", and of "source" sentence: the implication is that there is a full form, and these are shortened versions of it, hence a hierarchy of "more full" (and by implication "more correct") sentences. This is not true - the shorter and longer forms have equal status grammatically. You may not have intended this hierarchy, but it is strongly suggested by your wording. – Colin Fine Aug 2 '11 at 11:10
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